ISES is a postgraduate educational and research center. Our main research activities cluster around the following subjects:
Democratic Governance in the Context of Global Crisis
The ISES academic community believes, in league with a large coalition of international intellectuals, that democracies today need a fresh start that could catapult them from their multi-level dysfunctions. Since these flaws are heavily intrconnected, it would be a mistake to name a specific locus for democratic reform. The dysfunctional democratic system of the nation state could hardly be revitalized without the interventions of supranational political entities or the pressures of global civil society. Meanwhile, the above transnational political actors can hardly win the legitimacy and the power that they need to effectively function without the support of well-functioning democratic nation states. ISES inquires upon the reform of democratic governance on global, European and national levels.
Creative Cities, Sustainable Regions
Today’s age in which global economic competition increases and nation states are losing their power presents new challenges to cities, towns, agglomerations and regions. These municipal, regional entities have to find for themselves a new place on the economic, polical and cultural map. They have to develop new mechanisms of lateral, horizontal cooperation, and parallelly, they need to invent a new culture of self-organization and innovativity. To put their networked local economies in motion in a way that guarantees the sustained welfare of local society, cities and regions have to ceverly reinvent their cultural heritage and sensitively unravel the creative potential of their population.
From Crisis To a New Age of Uncertainty.
Human and social existence has always been confronted with uncertainty, but there are ages and periods when the feeling of uncertainty gains in strength. In the last few decades our world has entered such a period. At the current historical moment, the gathering evidence clearly indicates that human induced disasters are becoming commonplace. Mankind has entered a new age of unprecedented uncertainty.
